Ethnic Studies Department

Situated in a region where the US-Mexico border zone, indigenous national and tribal governments, and the Asia-Pacific interact to produce a dynamic geopolitical location, UCSD’s Ethnic Studies Department is a vibrant community of scholars committed to the interdisciplinary study of race, ethnicity, indigeneity, gender, sexuality, class, and dis/ability.

The department’s innovative approach represents a commitment to transnational, relational, and intersectional methods for producing critical knowledge about power and inequality, including systems of knowledge that have emerged from racialized and indigenous communities in global contexts.

Ethnic Studies is devoted to creative, conceptual, and empirical research; critical pedagogy; collaborations with a broad group of affiliated faculty; and social justice projects developed with and for the university, our home communities, and the broader public.

Learn more about the Ethnic Studies Department, or read the UCSD Principles of Community.

Welcome New Faculty

Welcome to our new Ethnic Studies Deparment faculty: Professor Lisa Lowe and Associate Professor Fatima El-Tayeb, both UCSD Literature, and Associate Professor Patrick W. Anderson, UCSD Communication, have accepted joint appointments in the Department of Ethnic Studies.

Associate Professor Dayo Gore will be joining the department in Fall 2012. Please check our faculty page to learn more about their work and courses they will be teaching.

Assistant Professor K. Wayne Yang named 2010 Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Award

Congratulations! to Assistant Professor K. Wayne Yang, who has been selected for the 2010 Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Award. Prof. Yang was honored, along with other recipients, at a ceremony on Friday, October 15. Prof. Yang's success as both an instructor and mentor derives from his unwavering commitment to an educational process that embodies social justice. His extraordinary passion for teaching, profound respect for learning, and faith in his students' abilities motivate them while he provides tools for understanding how to interpret the complex interplay of race and ethnicity, culture, and power. Yang has inspired many of his students to make issues of race and ethnicity an integral part of their future careers, whether in medicine, law, or engineering. His students overwhelmingly describe him as "someone who goes above and beyond the required responsibilities of a mentor" and who "pushes the limits of students' intellectual, emotional, and creative abilities to produce work that, often, they themselves are surprised, yet fulfilled, by."